Here's something I come across fairly frequently: A large collection (list or table) of items serves as an overview, displaying only the name of each individual item (with a link to the respective resource).

Now the global Health Inspector General wants to use this overview to display employees, schedule inspection dates and assign priorities - without having to click through to each individual restaurant's page.

So essentially, what we need here is some sort of on-demand context menu, both for displaying additional details and for performing actions on the respective item.

However, none of the options I can think of seem appealing to me:

overload item link to display a modal dialog -- undesirable because the direct link should still be accessible

display icon(s) next to each item to bring up a modal dialog -- with many items, this adds a lot of noise

make the aforementioned icon(s) only display on-mouse-over -- this seems a bit jarring and unintuitive

expand each item on-click, accordion-style -- this seems like a weird combination of #1 + #2 + #3 and adds the issue of layout disruption

hijack mouse right-clicking -- nobody should do this on the web, ever

Is there a better way, perhaps an already established convention? Any suggestions would be most welcome!

A selectable list (like the GMail list of mail messages) and a sidebar menu seem to address most if not all of your concerns.
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Marjan VenemaJul 8 '12 at 9:50

I use GMail only rarely, but AFAICT this seems like my #1 - so I'm not thrilled about it. The sidebar option sounds interesting though - could you elaborate on that?
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AnCJul 8 '12 at 18:39

1

Well, in GMail, you can select a single or multiple mail messages and then perform an action on the selected messages. In GMail the actions are in a toolbar at the top of the list. You can also put them to the side of the list. That is all I meant with a side bar menu. Just a list of actions you can perform on the selected items. Preferably dimmed if the action cannot be performed on the selected item(s).
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Marjan VenemaJul 9 '12 at 8:44